Person

Patrick Matthew. Scottish farmer and biologist (died 1874)

Patrick Matthew was a Scottish grain merchant, fruit farmer, forester, and landowner, who contributed to the understanding of horticulture, silviculture, and agriculture in general, with a focus on maintaining the British navy and feeding new colonies. He published the basic concept of natural selection as a mechanism in evolutionary adaptation and speciation and species constancy or stasis in 1831 in a book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture in which he uses the phrase "the natural process of selection". He did not further publicly develop his ideas until after Darwin and Wallace published their theories of evolution by natural selection in 1859. It has been suggested that Darwin and/or Wallace had encountered Matthew's earlier work, but there is no evidence of this.